Justanatheist
Well-Known Member
I fully accept that, it is not the majority of Christians not even a large minority. You can read the debate on the thread the Words of Jesus from page two and I hope I gave as good as I got.
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Who knows about the "Taung child" fossil?
- Thread starter YoursTrue
- Start date
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
This is simply untrue.
Again, simply untrue. There is plentiful evidence from fossils but much of the evidence has nothing to do with them. The case could be made from genetics alone. We are also able to cross check genetic evidence with what we deduced from fossils and other evidence.
The reason for giving you the articles is that they explain (some of) the evidence that you keep claiming doesn't exist. If you spent some of the time you waste here repeating the same mistakes over and over again, reading them, you might learn something. Or is that what you're afraid of?
There was a link to just one (short) article, that I suggested you could start with, in the post you just quoted - right above where you wrote this!
There was also one you obviously started on and quoted in post #424 but then just picked out two examples that you thought you could easily dismiss and ignored the rest. See my post #432.
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
Insofar as this thread goes, (evolution theory) if so-called Christians did not support the war and killing of Jews and others throughout the centuries, it would not have happened. And Hitler as well as others fell for the superior race theory stemming from European white race prejudice as well, it's sometimes. Which is also why he killed homosexuals, and others. Since he believed the Aryan 'race' was the best of all.
"Historically, eugenics encouraged people of so-called healthy, superior stock to reproduce and discouraged reproduction of the mentally challenged or anyone who fell outside the social norm. Eugenics was popular in America during much of the first half of the twentieth century, yet it earned its negative association mainly from Adolf Hitler’s obsessive attempts to create a superior Aryan race."
Eugenics - HISTORY
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
I'll go to the post asap. Also, the next point up for discussion is your statement that the case for evolution can be made from genetics alone. Please do elucidate, thank you.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Everyone in this thread has already elucidated that for you, several times.
Time to do your own work.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evol...ings,shared traits increases with relatedness.
Eukaryotes
Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics
Evidence Supporting Biological Evolution - Science and Creationism - NCBI Bookshelf
Genomic Divergences between Humans and Other Hominoids and the Effective Population Size of the Common Ancestor of Humans and Chimpanzees
Quantitative Estimates of Sequence Divergence for Comparative Analyses of Mammalian Genomes
That would be interesting.
"I was doing some reading in the science journals and I deny the evidence I read about". "I don't understand what I read, therefore it is not correct".
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
I'll get back to this. Meantime if you can't explain in simple terms what I don't 'follow,' or understand, so be it. But it has been interesting. You guys have been in essence calling me stupid and uneducated, therefore because I don't believe that the "evidence" proves life on earth is a result of "natural" evolution, and if course the evidence doesn't prove anything, it's all been helpful and enlightening about your attitude(s).
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity.
The great thing about ignorance is that it can be corrected, as I keep trying to point out. I'm completely ignorant about auto mechanics, for example. That doesn't (necessarily) mean I'm stupid when it comes to auto mechanics. But it means that if I want to learn about it, I could take a class or ask someone to teach me about it, with the only caveat being that I actually want to learn about it. Otherwise, it's just a waste of time for someone to attempt teach it to me.
Personally, I'm just baffled as to why you don't appear to want to learn anything about this thing you don't understand and would apparently rather go 'round and 'round in circles asking the same "gotcha" questions over and over again and making the same declarative statements as though we haven't been talking about this stuff for the last 23 pages (and across multiple threads).
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
The idea that life happened by chance is not something I comprehend or accept in whatever rationality someone might put to it. One can explain colors in a scientific way, for instance, but it does not really explain how they all came about. I'm speaking of reality, not conjecture or trying to figure how it happened that chimps evolved from another genetic type. So while I can accept and understand that humans are genetically similar to gorillas, I do not think it happened by chance. Puleeze I hope you won't argue with the word chance, but if you do, o well. Thanks for your patience. While I understand the thought that life just happened to happen somehow with chance molecules combining, I do not see that as reality or a possibility. I hope that clears up some of my thought process for you, and thank you for listening.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Here's exactly what I am talking about.
Evolution is not about how life came about. That is abiogenesis.
This has been pointed out to you by myself countless times, as well as by other posters.
Evolution doesn't occur "by chance" either. There are selective pressures at play, which have also been explained to you.
And here you are still going on about "chance."
I'm sorry, but this is not the hallmark of a person who is interested in correcting their own ignorance on the subject matter. You aren't taking in new information. You aren't learning anything with these questions you repeatedly ask. How do I know that? Because you just keep asking them over and over again.
Be honest, are you seriously looking for serious answers to your questions?
tas8831
Well-Known Member
Oh, right - there was this instance as well - "it". Two separate species - she was referring to two different sets of fossils, one from Hadar, and hers from Laetoli. And you must know this since you have the quote and thus have read the book.
Right?
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
If I am incorrect about the following, let me know please. I'm not really talking about abiogenesis. I'm talking about the "beginning." Can you explain that beginning? I know that populations that interbreed with those of like characteristics (such as blue eyes, blond hair) are more likely to reproduce those with blue eyes and blond hair. I'm not talking about that. I know that happens, it's a demonstrable fact. But it's not Darwin's idea of evolution, as far as I am concerned. Just so we don't get muddled, humans reproducing those in a majority setting with dark skin, or light skin is not the idea of Darwinian evolution. I don't know if there is a "law" of genetics, but I would say that reproduction of like beings, including changes in characteristics of skin color, short or long legs, is NOT what I call evolution of the Darwinian kind.
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Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
"Mary Leakey was confident there were two species to be named. "
But that wasn't what happened. They were all lumped into one despite the evidence.
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
Gotta agree there. I think. So far.
OK, no, I take that back kind of, because the criteria (?) are?? what? Obviously not direct observance. It's not like blue eyes and light hair being passed on among humans, for instance. Or long or short legs. And so it kind of fits in the category of the "black box" in which nothing can be seen.
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YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
Again, that's what I'm talking about. Evolution had to START from somewhere, even if it's true. Which it's not. And by saying that, I don't mean reproduction of light or dark skinned people. I know you don't think that abiogenesis involves evolution, but really it does. Because -- something happened according to the concept of abiogenesis to start evolution. In fact, according to evolution theory, something started it. So the start of evolution is up for big question, isn't it? Yes, it is. And the "branching out" of the evolutionary tree is also up for question for a rather simple reason. NO ONE SAW THESE THINGS HAPPEN. Yes, I've heard the excuses -- too long ago. I no longer buy it. Gene similarity no longer explains certain issues to me. And of course, if a person realizes that there is no PROOF (as there is of humans producing offspring with dark or light skin), then what's left?
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
It is a question but it's not a question for the theory of evolution. For the sake of argument, let's just pretend that abiogenesis is physically impossible by natural means and god had to magic the first replicating organisms into being. The theory of evolution and the copious evidence that supports it stands regardless. It simply doesn't matter (to evolution) how the first replicators came into being.
There are all sorts of ways in which we can get very good evidence of things nobody has seem. It happens all the time in many branches of science. You've now been given lots and lots of links to the evidence, which you said you'd get back to and now seem to have 'forgotten'.
Now you've made the mistake about proof again. WHY do you NEVER learn anything?
The evidence from genetics isn't simply that the genomes are similar. It's about the exact patterns we find that fit with common descent and are very difficult to fit with individual design. You would know this if you'd read some of the articles you've been given.
Here is one again (the last three examples are about genetics): Common Descent vs. Common Design: 4 Examples Explained Better by Descent - Articles
There is also a link through to this article which points out that the pattern of differences between humans due to mutation is the same as the pattern of differences between humans and chimpanzees. If they were created separately, the creator has gone to a lot of trouble to make it look exactly as if they diverged by accumulated mutations: Testing Common Ancestry: It’s All About the Mutations - Articles
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
I linked to this article in my last reply but I'm going to quote a sizeable part of it because you have such a poor record of responding to linked articles and because it directly addresses your objections (and it's actually a Christian site).
One question that comes up frequently about evolutionary biology is whether it really boils down to speculation and assumption. Most of evolution happened in the distant past, after all. We claim that humans and chimpanzees descended from a single ancestral species over millions of years, for example, but none of us was there to observe that process. To a scientist, though, the right question is not, "Were you there?" but rather "What if?" What if we do share a common ancestor–what should we see? How can we test a hypothesis about the ancient past?
One way we can test for shared ancestry with chimpanzees is to look at the genetic differences between the two species. If shared ancestry is true, these differences result from lots of mutations that have accumulated in the two lineages over millions of years. That means they should look like mutations. On the other hand, if humans and chimpanzees appeared by special creation, we would not expect their genetic differences to bear the distinctive signature of descent from a common ancestor.
What do mutations look like, then? DNA consists of a long string of four chemical bases, which we usually call A, C, G and T (for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine). A mutation is any change to that string. In the simplest mutations, one base replaces another when DNA is incorrectly copied or repaired, e.g., a C at a particular site in a chromosome is replaced by a T, which is then passed onto offspring. These substitutions do not all happen at the same rate; some occur more often than others. For example, C and T are chemically similar to one another, as are A and G, and chemically similar bases are more likely to be mistaken for one another when DNA is being copied. Thus, we find an A becoming a G more often than a T.
This means that as they accumulate, mutations create a characteristic pattern of more and less common changes. It is that pattern that we can look for to see if genetic differences were caused by mutations. To determine exactly what the pattern is, we can just look at genetic differences between individual humans, because these represent mutations that occurred since those two people last shared a common ancestor...
...
Now we are in a position to test whether genetic differences between humans and chimps look like mutations. To determine the pattern for mutations, I calculated the rates for the four classes using human diversity data (which is available online). Then I calculated the pattern seen when comparing human and chimpanzee DNA, also using public data. The first graph is the distribution for humans. As expected, transitions are the most common. That pattern is our signature–the sign that mutation has been at work.
The second graph is the same distribution for differences between human and chimpanzee DNA. The overall rates are different–there are 12 times as many differences between human and chimpanzee DNA as there are between DNA from two humans (note the different scale on the y-axis of the graphs)–but the pattern is almost identical.
Remember my opening question: if humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor, what should we see? What we should see is what we do see: genetic differences between the species that look exactly like they were produced by mutations. In scientific terms, I had a hypothesis about the distant past, I tested the hypothesis with data, and it passed the test.
Now, when scientists point to similarities between human and chimpanzee DNA, critics sometimes object that similarities don’t really prove anything, since they could be explained equally well by a common design plan: the creator might well use similar stretches of DNA to carry out similar tasks in separately created species. That objection does not apply here, though, because we are looking at the differences between species. I cannot think of any reason why a designer should choose to make the differences look exactly like they were the result of lots of mutations. The obvious conclusion is that things are what they seem: humans and chimpanzees differ genetically in just this pattern because they have diverged from a single common ancestor.
One way we can test for shared ancestry with chimpanzees is to look at the genetic differences between the two species. If shared ancestry is true, these differences result from lots of mutations that have accumulated in the two lineages over millions of years. That means they should look like mutations. On the other hand, if humans and chimpanzees appeared by special creation, we would not expect their genetic differences to bear the distinctive signature of descent from a common ancestor.
What do mutations look like, then? DNA consists of a long string of four chemical bases, which we usually call A, C, G and T (for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine). A mutation is any change to that string. In the simplest mutations, one base replaces another when DNA is incorrectly copied or repaired, e.g., a C at a particular site in a chromosome is replaced by a T, which is then passed onto offspring. These substitutions do not all happen at the same rate; some occur more often than others. For example, C and T are chemically similar to one another, as are A and G, and chemically similar bases are more likely to be mistaken for one another when DNA is being copied. Thus, we find an A becoming a G more often than a T.
This means that as they accumulate, mutations create a characteristic pattern of more and less common changes. It is that pattern that we can look for to see if genetic differences were caused by mutations. To determine exactly what the pattern is, we can just look at genetic differences between individual humans, because these represent mutations that occurred since those two people last shared a common ancestor...
...
Now we are in a position to test whether genetic differences between humans and chimps look like mutations. To determine the pattern for mutations, I calculated the rates for the four classes using human diversity data (which is available online). Then I calculated the pattern seen when comparing human and chimpanzee DNA, also using public data. The first graph is the distribution for humans. As expected, transitions are the most common. That pattern is our signature–the sign that mutation has been at work.
The second graph is the same distribution for differences between human and chimpanzee DNA. The overall rates are different–there are 12 times as many differences between human and chimpanzee DNA as there are between DNA from two humans (note the different scale on the y-axis of the graphs)–but the pattern is almost identical.
Remember my opening question: if humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor, what should we see? What we should see is what we do see: genetic differences between the species that look exactly like they were produced by mutations. In scientific terms, I had a hypothesis about the distant past, I tested the hypothesis with data, and it passed the test.
Now, when scientists point to similarities between human and chimpanzee DNA, critics sometimes object that similarities don’t really prove anything, since they could be explained equally well by a common design plan: the creator might well use similar stretches of DNA to carry out similar tasks in separately created species. That objection does not apply here, though, because we are looking at the differences between species. I cannot think of any reason why a designer should choose to make the differences look exactly like they were the result of lots of mutations. The obvious conclusion is that things are what they seem: humans and chimpanzees differ genetically in just this pattern because they have diverged from a single common ancestor.
Also, just to be clear, this is not the genetic evidence for evolution, it is just a small sample.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
You are talking about abiogenesis when you talk about the "beginning."
In a thread about evolution? No.
What is it that you think "Darwin's idea of evolution" is, and why would that be relevant to a discussion about evolution in the 21st Century?
Evolution is the change in gene frequencies in a population over successive generations.
So I'm unsure why you believe that populations of organisms successfully reproducing and passing their genes onto their offspring is not what evolution is about.
Could you clarify?
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Evolution starts when life already exists.
Life had to start somewhere, for sure. But evolution isn't about where life started. That is a different discussion and a different thread.
We can study gravity without knowing where gravity originated from, right? We can study how germs are spread without knowing where the very first germ came from, right?
Same thing here.